Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday April 20, 2010 @08:48AM
from the no-way-he's-biased dept.

angry tapir writes "According to BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker, the Internet industry has to regulate itself by responding to consumer demands in the wake of the recent US federal court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission didn't have authority to enforce its net neutrality rules."

Or rather, the "choice" is between No ISP, Shitty company A, and if you're REALLY lucky, perhaps Shitty Company B.

My area is an urban area. I'm "lucky" to have cable and DSL competing. Or really not, because it's Comrape and A-Titty-Twister "competing" with each other, which is to say, not competing at all.

We can complain all day long, but we as consumers are fucked, because 90% or better of Americans live in an area where the only ISP has a monopoly, and the other 10% have a duopoly at best if they are lucky. And apparently, nothing short of an act of Congress (and I shudder since Obama and the rest of the Senators/"Representatives" are pretty much bought-off scumbags who don't represent us at all) will fix it.

Unfortunately, we are stuck with the exact same situation you describe...we just moved into a new apartment building, and everything is almost perfect...except Internet. We have a choice between Comcast Cable, or the local DSL provider. Since my fiancee is a 3rd grade teacher and does a TON of work from home, and I do a lot of online gaming, a DSL line just wouldn't cut it...so, we're stuck with Comcast.

Can you please explain why DSL wouldn't cut it. The most basic ADSL speed my provider offers is 8 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up. Are these speeds comparable with what you can get for DSL.

More on topic, I can get a range of providers here in the Netherlands for both cable and ADSL. I have chosen a provider that has a history of good service and without the blocking of some ports I use (i.e. port 25).

"depending on how close you are" - those are the key words. In 1 apartment I lived in, the switching junction was literally about 100 feet from where I lived. Speed was decent for the time. I then moved, staying in the same general area in the city (only moved about a mile south), and then I could only get the lowest tier speed becasue I was too far away. If I wanted anything faster than 1 MB down, I had to go with cable.

I live in Atlanta and have Comcast. It's cheaper than Clear, and faster than DSL. I never have downtime and I download a few torrents a month with no problem. I mean, unless Atlanta is the exception, my Internet is never down, and I never have any issues. 45 bucks a month for something so important and integrated into daily life, you don't see me complaining. You could probably negotiate your rent down 100 bucks if you are _that_ strapped for cash.

It has nothing to do with being strapped for cash. I Comcast's quality of service in the DC/Metropoliton area is spotty at best (We live in Montgomery County). You know the saying vote with your wallet? I don't want to support Comcast's business, but due to my fiancee's professional needs as a teacher as well as the fact that we both like to game online, DSL won't cut it... so we don't have a choice.

And if you are completely raping the 'unlimited' service because you want to utilize the full 15mbps 100% of the time, to pull terabytes of illegal data, I don't want to hear about it. You are a fucking retard and I hope your balls explode.

If you live in Montgomery County, Maryland, and don't own a home, chances are very good you will be stuck with either DSL or Comcast. Since we never plan on owning a home in this area, we would be stuck with it no matter where we moved.

There isn't much the government can do about that. Comcast's size prohibits competition, not loose laws.

yes because everyone on slashdot never broke the law ONCE. We are all corrupt. Just at different levels of the scale.

Breaking the law != corrupt.

Corrupt is working against the people's best interests for some benefit of some 3rd party who is your benefactor. On that level I can safely state that most of Slashdot is not corrupt, because most of us are poor, unwashed, plebes whose only true power is choosing between Coke and Pepsi.

Most of/. might possibly be corrupt if somehow power fell into our laps, but lacking power there is no real opportunity to be corrupt.

As I read this thread, it strikes me that there might be something worse than corrupt.

A corrupt politician might accept campaign contributions from big business, know that he's not really right, and do the minimum necessary to fulfill his quid-pro-quo without buying into it.

On the other hand, there are also politicians who believe in the big business cause, accept campaign contributions because they feel that those businesses are important constituents, and pursue those goals with personal will, desire, and

We're fucked as long as most consumers are so hypnotized by marketing and ubiquitous advertising that they are no longer able to make informed decisions based on their own best interests.

They're glad to whip out the plastic and raise their credit limits no matter how much shit they have to eat, as long as it's...shiny.

Until consumers understand that no corporation is their friend, and even the best of them will act badly, we're only going slide further into mercantile serfdom, where we exist to feed the corporations. Either that or we have to elect officials who will enact real consumer protections, with teeth. Since most politicians work for the corporations, that is unlikely.

I'm afraid we're going to have to fight this war ourselves, or accept that things will get worse.

Actually, it turns out that the image of people spending oodles on worthless crap is not an entirely accurate picture. Watch and learn from Elizabeth Warren [youtube.com]. Are there outliers? Sure, but the statistical trends she describes are very very clear.

If you don't have time for the whole thing, one of her basic points is that middle class folks are not in fact buying lots of clothing or appliances or other shiny toys, but are spending far more on housing than they used to (for a house which is not much larger and probably older than what their parents would have bought in the 70's), and because of the higher fixed expenses have significantly less discretionary funds to spend and save. So on average an American middle class family is doing everything they can to reduce spending and still not making ends meet, much less have any savings available.

Or rather, the "choice" is between No ISP, Shitty company A, and if you're REALLY lucky, perhaps Shitty Company B.

I wish Americans on Slashdot would really pay attention to this. Where exactly do these people live that supposedly do have choice? I live in one of the top 10 metropolitan areas of the USA and my choice is limited to my cable and my regional telephone provider. That's it. If I don't like one I can go to the other, but if I don't like both then I am out of options. I hear people always talking smack about how you can just change ISPs if you don't like something, but where exactly is this really a viabl

On the Internet though, your neighbor can easily run a "factory" by simply seeding a bunch of torrents like an asshole, using all the bandwidth.

Or by watching cats all day on Youtube...or by watching TV episodes on Hulu all day, or streaming movies through Netflix all day, or any other number of bandwith-intensive activities.

Torrent users are being targeted because they are the easiest ones to go after...what about the stay at home mom who streams Netflix and Hulu 8 hours a day, or the patent examiner who works from home and is constantly streaming c-span reruns to help with their research?

There are a lot of high bandwith uses for the Internet that don't involve piracy or torrents...so why is it only torrents are being targeted?

what about the stay at home mom who streams Netflix and Hulu 8 hours a day, or the patent examiner who works from home and is constantly streaming c-span reruns to help with their research? There are a lot of high bandwith uses for the Internet that don't involve piracy or torrents...so why is it only torrents are being targeted?

Possibly because for every patent examiner who happens to work from home downloading c-span reruns, there are 100,000 kids downloading DVD rips of movies they want to watch.

i suspect its because its not about bandwidth, but the number of connections.

it could very well be that the ISPs have calculated maybe 1-3 connections pr account (a web connection is only active while a page is downloading, same with mail and such), and so have grabbed cheap gear that can handle only that many connections at a time. But with torrents the count can hit 100+ fairly quickly, and multiply that by the number of accounts attached to a box and things hit industrial quite fast. And these connections are active 24/7, or at least as long as the computer is online.

so the traffic have gone from 1-3 transient connections a minute, to 100+ a second.

i suspect its because its not about bandwidth, but the number of connections. it could very well be that the ISPs have calculated maybe 1-3 connections pr account (a web connection is only active while a page is downloading, same with mail and such), and so have grabbed cheap gear that can handle only that many connections at a time.

Huh? Why would they do that? A TCP connection doesn't send packets when idle, unless you have keepalive turned on, and even then, the packets are small and rare. The only pl

On the Internet though, your neighbor can easily run a "factory" by simply seeding a bunch of torrents like an asshole, using all the bandwidth.

Or by watching cats all day on Youtube...or by watching TV episodes on Hulu all day, or streaming movies through Netflix all day, or any other number of bandwith-intensive activities.

Torrent users are being targeted because they are the easiest ones to go after...what about the stay at home mom who streams Netflix and Hulu 8 hours a day, or the patent examiner who works from home and is constantly streaming c-span reruns to help with their research?

There are a lot of high bandwith uses for the Internet that don't involve piracy or torrents...so why is it only torrents are being targeted?

Because Bittorrent users upload. Cut the upload and they won't be targeted. Of course, that kinda negates the point of Bittorrent, but oh well.

YouTube's a download activity. Ditto Hulu.

You see, residential connections are horribly one-sided, optimized for downloads moreso than uploads (especially cable - any wonder why the biggest blockers are cable companies? Comcast, Time-Warner...). In fact on cable, it's so bad that a few users on the top tier high-speed plan can easily take down an entire node just by uploading at full speed, because no one else can fit their upload packets into the stream. And anyone who's played with a packet shaper knows what happens when you don't prioritize VoIP and online gaming. When the upstream is saturated, the internet is slow for everyone and latencies go through the roof.

But downloading huge streams is easy for cable because the upstream requirement is very low while you're grabbing MTU-sized packets on the downstream (a tiny 64-byte TCP ACK packet for a 1460 user bytes), especially since the download bandwidth is effectively unlimited - there's just that much of it around.

They're happy that people are using Hulu and Netflix and other stuff - download is effectively free, and there's actually enough of it to go around for everyone to stream all day. But uploads - well a few video chats and VoIP calls aren't doing too much (barely 100 kilobits in most cases) compared to the megabits that a few torrent users easily consume.

Perhaps the only comparable activity to Bittorrent uploading 24/7 would be a VPN, but even VPNs tend to be at best very bursty and not continuous.

Last I checked Coaxial cable isn't like a river, it sends signals equally in both directions.....Its not like it has some magical quality that makes electrons flow in one direction (towards your computer) much easier than the alternative (towards the net). Just because the ISP doesn't want to provide you with the bandwidth doesn't mean shit. This is exactly why important infrastructure needs to be socialized. Yes, fuck you I said it, publicly owned. Everyone pays for equal parts up and down. This is an comp

... personally, I would love to move to a purely metered service, perhaps with some monthly minimum. I like my downloads to go really fast, but I rarely download things. My thinking is that the ISPs would very much overcharge for the transfers (at first), but overall this would be a much better model.

The reality is that an ISP cannot make money reselling bandwidth at 10th the cost of the actual bandwidth if people are actually going to expect to be able to use it 24x7. That just doesn't make any kind of sense. So unless you're in the mood to backhaul your own T1 to your house (1.5megs sure sounds slow doesn't it... $300/m not counting termination fees); how can you realistically expect the ISP to do this for you for $30/m? They can't. They depend on you not using it all the time or they can't make any money.

So they're either going to fuck with our connections *or* we can pay for what we use. Something is going to give and I'd rather they treat all my traffic the same, so I'd rather pay for a metered service like I do with electricity.

There are economies of scale that make T1s more expensive, just like a dedicated electric line would be. And ISPs also appear to be quite profitable, certainly not suffering 90% losses. Somehow companies in other countries are able to make money selling a lot more bandwidth for less.

But really you wouldn't have posted, I wouldn't have read your post, and I certainly wouldn't have replied if we were paying the $30/month+$.50/MB (since you are like most customers and don't download much you can hardly expec

On the Internet though, your neighbor can easily run a "factory" by simply seeding a bunch of torrents like an asshole, using all the bandwidth.

As the recipient of an AUP violation letter from comcast for using more than 90GB in a month (I actually called and asked what the limit was, and after talking to about four people, some guy told me this, shrug) I know that ISPs will terminate or at least throttle this type of customer. See, they don't make money on these people, so why not alienate 'em?

Yes, they're experiments, but the GP is still somewhat accurate. Yes, electricity isn't "stored" by electric companies, but they can reduce how much is generated. Lots of highly paid engineers earn their living designing highly complicated systems to determine where to strike that balance. The municipal power company where I live is an old-school oil burning plant. No, they don't store up electricity once it's been generated, but they can do things like burning less oil during periods of lower consumption w

Not entirely, but the costs can be managed slightly more for power generation than for bandwidth. No, you can't just shut down an entire coal plant, but you can burn less coal at night than you would during the day. A cooler summer leads to less air conditioner use, thereby reducing power consumption. Yes, these are very broad terms and I realize that there is a floor to how much power can be 'not generated', but there certainly must be some wiggle room. A few years ago there was a HUGE push to get everyone

It does not matter if energy storage is fairly rare. Until we move to an all solar energy economy, it costs money for every joule of energy produced. When consumption goes down, fuel use goes down as well while boiler furnaces are run at idle.

i suspect one part of the problem is the peering agreements that make the net possible.

Especially now that torrents and such moves traffic away from the peering connections heading to the web-farms (or maybe the closest akamai mirror), and onto individual customers. It would not surprise me of the ISP contract contains a mention of not allowing any kind of server to be run from a home customer connection.

I think you missed the point. Suppose the oven is the only significant power draw. By moving to a metered system, people who cook in the oven a couple times a week would see some small savings, those who cook one meal a day in it would pay a bit more than they are, and the person studying to be a pastry chef pays through the nose.

Its the USA, the telco gave cash to train their congresscritters.
They have debated out scientists, academics, evidence, facts and reality.
Do you have the cash to train a team of powerful congresscritters to compete against herds owned by your telco and allied companies?
Find the MS, Apples, Googles astroturf efforts and help gain control over your greedy rust belt telcos again.Their job in life is to lay pipe, not worry about what is pushed out.

I have no problem with them giving preferential treatment to different types of internet traffic. I do that within my own network (QOS on a WRT54GL running Tomato). I do not see why an ISP should not have the same right. It allows them to give better service to their customers. But, I do not think they should be able to hobble a protocol without oversight. And because, as a content distributor, Comcast has an interest users having less access to content online, and they are in most areas a monopoly in

I don't mind different types of traffic getting priority, as long as two things remain true. First, the bandwidth allocated to high and low priority remains the same as it is now. Second, the priority is for type of traffic not source of traffic.

The FCC didn't have the statutory authority to enforce network neutrality. Congress never authorized it. Do you really want the courts siding with the FCC on a precedent that could give federal agencies a de jure resumption to write regulatory laws without congressional delegation?

You know when people talk about saving democracy and all that crap?

That's precisely what the federal courts did by bitch-slapping a federal agency that claimed regulatory powers well outside the scope of its congressional mandate.

I agree. But I do not think it is similar to this case. The reason why deregulation helped in air travel is because there were many competing companies, so the market was able to "self-regulate" because people would vote with their pocketbooks. ISPs are different because there is currently a monopoly in most areas of the country, so there is no market to "self-regulate" itself. There are only the monopolies (or duopolies), which do not have the incentive to self-regulate.

Pretty much everything down at the grocery store has competition without much regulation to speak of, it's just that some markets doesn't naturally lead to competition. Run multiple sets of sewage pipes is a great example that most see is extremely impractical. Forced leasing of lines and rackspace in centrals are vital to a working market, and yes the owner do make a good profit off it anyway. They can't just practically shut off people so that it's their service or no service, speed might not be better bu

The United States Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association is the self-regulating body for non-powered human flight AKA ultralights. FAA regulations part 103 basically says "Do whatever the heck you want, between dawn and dusk, just stay the heck out of the way of regular air traffic." No inspections, no required certifications, no reporting requirements, no helmet requirements, etc.

Self-regulation works in this case because because pilots want to keep the government out of their way, so they

Doesn't "self regulation" usually result in services and pricing that always benefit the industry at the expense of the consumer?

Only if free markets don't work. I think if you're a libertarian or a liberal* economist, you believe that free markets work by assumption rather than because of the evidence (maybe even in spite of the evidence).

This is only because of regulation. The reason I can't build a fiber ring in my small town and offer gigabit speeds is because of FCC Regulation. Regulation creates the monopoly you describe. Also monopolies aren't necessarily bad. If the monopoly causes the prices to remain low (think Wal-mart) then the consumer benefits.

No, the reason you can't build a fiber ring in your small town is because you're a penniless hippy who nobody in their right mind would lend millions of dollars to. If you had the resources to compete with the cartel, you'd be a member of it.

Free markets are a charming childhood fiction, like Santa Claus, the Easter bunny or male-friendly lesbians. Once you grow up, you realize that there's no such creature.

The inevitable state for a mature market is monopoly or cartel, and the price of freedom is eternal regulation.

More exactly, there are some industries (telecom being one of them) for which a monopoly is in fact (theoretically at least) the most economically efficient way to provide the good/service, provided that something is done to prevent the monopoly from overcharging their customers. The reason this happens is because in some industries the economies of scale mean that the volume that produces the lowest possible cost of the service is more than the total demand for the service. Some other industries (such as u

All monopolies are theoretically cheaper. They don't have to waste money on marketing, and can dictate terms to their suppliers. I can't think of any industries where competition drives down the cost of production; I don't know what you mean by an "upscale" restaurant. It helps not to make up words when you're trying to make a point.

Regulation is time- and context-dependent. Sometimes in some situations it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. The problem is, most regulation is written in inflexible language (because laws kinda have to be) and don't get revisited unless someone is paying money to have someone pay attention to it. Ideally, it would be monitored by someone with no conflict of interest and removed when unnecessary. This hypothetical person would have to live in a cave and herd goats for a living, but still keep up with d

We just GIVE the FCC the power to regulate (bitchslap) troublemaker isps like comcast.

We don't have to. The FCC can do that part itself.

The only thing that this ruling really says is that the current FCC regulations don't allow the FCC to do net neutrality. But since the FCC writes its own regulations, all it has to do is issue a new set (using the procedures required by itself (public comment periods, that sort of thing)) and they can then do net neutrality to their hearts' content.

Does nobody read the news? Hello? Google? They are moving into the ISP market offering fiber to the curb at insane speeds. They are putting pressure on the established players and if they don't shape up Google is going to eat them for breakfast. The internet depends on net neutrality and if the established ISPs won't provide it other internet businesses that depend on the internet will.

Communities here and there are forming cooperatives and laying fiber. So that's one fix.

Free market doesn't work when there aren't alternatives, and the lack of alternatives is, in many cases, caused by neighborhoods which enter into exclusive contracts with broadband providers. So it only makes sense that the solution is also at the local level.

I'm a little tired of hearing "bittorrent" used as a synonym for "piracy". Do lawmakers, ISPs, and IP holders not realize that bittorrent has plenty of legitimate uses as a distributed filesharing platform? And I'm not just talking about Linux ISOs: One example is World of Warcraft, which has integrated bittorrent technology into it's patcher. For a piece of software that popular, not using bittorrent or something similar would probably bring down the patch server constantly.

Bittorrent != piracy (or copyright infringement). Stop using them in the same breath.

Oh I completely agree. But the fact remains that BitTorrent is *currently* used for commercial services by more than 11M end-users (many of whom are non-geeks).

I guess I'm saying that BT is not the exclusive realm of pirates and "Linux distro downloaders", neither of which are a significant demographic in the minds of decisionmakers. Imagine if Microsoft started using BT on Patch Tuesday...

Recently, during a freeleech period, a private music tracker with ~120k users handled over 570TB traffic. In six days. Obviously, beeing freeleech, that's more than that tracker would normally see in a couple months, but that's still a LOT of traffic.

So, the numbers are from a few years ago, but from what I can find there are about 10,000 homicides and 16,000 suicides a year committed using guns in the US. On the other hand, the US civilian population is estimated to possess over 200,000,000 firearms (65,000,000 handguns).

I am not even any sort of gun "enthusiast", but that statement is pretty ridiculous.

Let's be honest, 90% of guns are used to kill people. Let's abolish the 2nd amendment!

There are an estimated 200-250 million guns in the US. In 2009, there were less than 20k gun related deaths, the majority of them suicides. The vast, vast majority of guns are never even fired, but your 90% statistic is off by a factor of approximately 900000 (which also assumes incorrectly that every gun related death is committed by a different gun).

Last time I checked, it was not illegal to download p0rn. Why are you lumping it in with illegal activities?

And yes, there are illegal ways of downloading p0rn (copyrighted or underage). But, regardless of the ethical considerations, there is no law against downloading a video of consenting adults engaged in sexual activities. (At least, no federal law that I know of. I am sure some of the more conservative states have laws against it)

I hear what you're saying, but I'll remember it like this:
"bittorrent" used as a synonym for "piracy". bittorrent has plenty of legitimate uses as a distributed filesharing platform? And I'm not just talking about Linux ISOs: One example is World of Warcraft, which has integrated bittorrent technology into it's patcher. For a piece of software t

Users always like their download go fast. They click on a page and it should display immediately.Initially, ISP clients don't download much over time, only spikes when they clic on pages.So at a given time, only 1/100th of the user are having any data flowing online.

Thus an ISP could use 100mbit/s upstream per 10'000 users and sell them "1mbit/s connections". As in fact only 100 of them will be transferring data at any given time (while the other read webpages

they become monopolies or oligopolies, and warp the marketplace so only they benefit

the greatest enemy of the free marketplace, true capitalism, is not socialism or communism, but monopolies and oligopolies. people need to understand the difference between capitalism and corporatism

capitalism is the engine of growth of any economy, and the country that is able to keep the marketplaces as close to free as possible is the country that prospers. corporatism meanwhile is all about the larger players in the marketplace paying off the government, abusing natural defects in the marketplace, and otherwise ossifying and abusing their size to squash innovation and consumers to maximize profit. what's most important is to realize that the only tool you have against capitalism devolving into corporatism is a government with strong regulatory powers. the players in the mark place won't self-regulate, ever... well, they WILL self-regulate, if by that you mean the degenrate meaning of merely consolidating their power at the expense of the free market

the "shocking" realization for the libertarian free market fundamentalist is that the friend of the true capitalist is a strong central government with lots of regulations. it seems contradictory to the common rhetoric, but its absolutely true. perhaps the common rhetoric has been bought and paid for by corporatists. perhaps those who fight government, whether out of being propagandized or being naive, are actually working for the oligopolies whose true desire is to crush the individual and the marketplace (for then they profit more)

if you are a true libertarian, your greatest enemy are oligopolies, not communists

we need a sea change on the right in terms of seeing that large corporations are not their friends, and represent a greater threat to their beliefs and their country than any bleeding heart liberal could ever be

I'm actually kind of glad it hasn't fallen under the FCC, because it just wouldn't make any sense. Whatever level of government is creating the monopolies, is who should be regulating. Cable Company has a franchise with your city? Then the city is the one who should demand neutrality (and any other necessary pros for the quids). And in the rare situations where an ISP doesn't have any monopoly force, there's no need to regulate them, because their customers and competitors can handle the job.

I know people generally hate this idea, because they don't want to get involved with local politics and only show up for general elections so they can vote party tickets, but tying the special favors directly to the restrictions is the right thing to do. If you don't like local politics, the problem is with you, not the fact that you have a local government. Get over it, face up to your responsibility, and demand some conditions the next time you use government to transfer your power to other private entities.

About 60 other companies distribute versions of BitTorrent software, which is open source, but the ["official BT"] company has about 70 million users out of a worldwide total of about 100 million, according to Klinker.

I must be on the wrong trackers, because I sure see a much higher representation of non "BitTorrent" clients than 30%. If anything, I'd say Klinker's official BT client represents a minority of users.

And where does that 100 million figure come from? Are there "only" 100 million BT u

Since we have no choice in what ISP to choose from since they'll all do this if one does it...couldn't we just protest by all dropping all of our providers at once? Simply use wireless hotspots for a month or two (libraries, etc...) to get "work" done and get some extra sleep at night rather than stream one last movie (or, you know, dust off your DVD/VHS/Betamax collection). Go one month without internet--if enough people go along with it and actually commit, the ISPs won't think they have it made like a

some of you think that if there was choice, you could just choose the isp which respected net neutrality and problem would be solved.

it is anything but this. just check any sector in regard to products and services :

some corporations start some practice in their product/service. if they can get away, others start to imitate it. when the number of companies practicing it hits a noticeable level (and corresponding market share), the practice becomes de facto standard of the sector. in almost every field this is like that.

so, even if you had competition, 2-3 major isps (at&t filth etc) would start filtering their traffic, and after a while try to push it as de facto, logical nature of the industry. they can take huge losses, they have staying power, they can wait. you couldnt expect smaller isps to resist for long.

this is something like your free speech rights - you cant just skip enforcing them, and then just expect everythign to 'work out fine' by itself. some things need enforcement.